LOS ANGELES--(Business Wire)--OneLegacy has announced the opening of California’s first dedicated
Transplant Recovery Center designed to handle organ, eye and tissue
donation and to provide renewed hope to the thousands waiting to receive
the gift of life.

“Repeated studies have shown that donor organ recovery performed at a
dedicated facility improves donation outcomes while reducing costs,”
said OneLegacy Chief Operating Officer Prasad Garimella. “Simply put,
the opening of this center means that we can save more lives by enabling
more rapid recovery and transplantation while freeing hospital ICU beds
and operating rooms for their emergency patients. The center will also
reduce the costs of recovery while providing special care for donor
families.”

The new center is located in Redlands where OneLegacy has had an office
presence since 1998. The 40,000-square-foot Transplant Recovery Center
will operate 24/7/365 in full compliance with increasingly stringent FDA
regulations regarding tissue recovery and meeting all of the standards
for organ, tissue and eye recovery. Currently 27 organ procurement
organizations (OPOs) throughout the nation perform tissue recoveries at
dedicated suites, and 14 OPOs perform organ recoveries at their
dedicated facilities.

Traditionally, when the family of a person declared brain-dead
authorizes organ donation, the process of diagnosing and improving the
viability of the eligible donor’s organs is managed in the donor’s
hospital. “This new process of moving donor management out of the
hospital takes pressure off busy hospitals where long waits for
operating rooms and accessing ICU beds are common,” Garimella said.
“And, unlike a hospital, there is no chance at this dedicated facility
that an emergency trauma patient will come in and delay the organ
recovery team.”

In an article published in the Journal of the American College of
Surgeons in 2016, transplant surgeons reported that obtaining organs
from deceased organ donors costs much less and leads to a higher number
of transplantable organs recovered when brain-dead donors are moved from
the hospital to an independent, freestanding facility dedicated to organ
recovery.

The opening of California’s first dedicated Transplant Recovery Center
is the latest in OneLegacy’s long history of pioneering clinical
innovations that allow for the successful recovery and transplantation
of organs, eyes and tissue from generous donors. OneLegacy also operates
the largest nonprofit eye bank in California, which houses all ocular
products needed for surgical use.

In 2017 OneLegacy reported 487 organ donors and 2,642 tissue and eye
donors, resulting in 1,374 lifesaving organ transplants and up to
200,000 lives healed through tissue and cornea transplantation. It also
saw 1,249 corneas processed and distributed by OneLegacy, as compared to
1,054 in 2016.

Currently nearly 115,000 Americans are waiting to receive a lifesaving
heart, liver, lung, kidney and/or pancreas; and 22 people die each day
while waiting for this second chance at life. Nationwide, a record
34,772 organ transplants were performed in 2017 using organs from both
deceased and living donors. This total is a 3.4 percent increase over
2016 and marks the fifth consecutive record-setting year for transplants
in the United States.

About OneLegacy

OneLegacy is a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving lives through
organ, eye and tissue donation in seven counties in Southern California:
Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, Santa Barbara
and Kern. Serving more than 200 hospitals, 11 transplant centers, and a
diverse population of nearly 20 million, OneLegacy is the largest organ,
eye and tissue recovery organization in the world. For more information,
visit onelegacy.org,
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